The Boggart

by Susan Cooper

For instance, the Boggart enjoyed moving a chair or a lamp two feet away from its customary place, so that it had to be moved back, usually by Robert, with muttered threats against the life of the once-a-week cleaning lady. If Emily tidied a bedroom drawer, the Boggart jumbled things up again. When Jessup organized all the books on his shelves alphabetically, by subject and author, the Boggart moved them into a different order overnight-using what he felt was an artistic pattern, with all the vowels lumped together in the middle of the alphabet. And when Maggie filled the sugar bowl with sugar one day, she found next morning that it was full of salt. The discovery was rather noisy, since Robert had just put a heaping spoonful into his breakfast coffee, stirred it briskly and taken a large gulp.

  The family reacted to all this in a satisfyingly predictable manner. At first each of them blamed himself or herself, for absent-mindedness. How could I have been dumb enough to leave that there? they would think, helplessly. But after a while they began privately to suspect that the absentmindedness belonged to someone else. It was Maggie who moved my razor, but she’s forgotten. Slowly this became a mutual irritation, and as the Boggart’s tricks became progressively more obvious, it grew into a conviction, in everyone’s separate mind, that some other member of the family was deliberately playing practical jokes.

  Em,Iwishyou’d stop changing the books on my shelves. It’s not funny.

  Ihaven’t touched your books.

  You must have — who elsewoulddo it?

  The Boggart hugged himself as he listened to the spurts and flares of impatience. This was the first part of the game, the prelude. This beginning time was his private pleasure, the time in which only he knew what was really happening. Very soon they would all move to the next: to the moment when he would push them over the edge, into the delicious discovery of the real inventor of all the tricks and jokes. After that there would come a different pleasure; they would realize that they had a boggart in the house, and live with him according to the time-honored rules. He would keep them from becoming bored; they would, on the whole, enjoy him. And he would be part of the family, like a quirky but valued relative. Just as he had been for so long with the MacDevon.

  It’s just you, is it then, my mannie? I’ll be after you one of these days. . . .

  So the Boggart looked ahead in happy anticipation, not knowing that he was living now in a world which no longer believed in boggarts, a world which had driven out the Old Things and buried the Wild Magic deep under layers of reason and time.

  SIX

  THE BOGGART’S TRICKS were not daily events. He had no interest in trying out a joke unless he was fairly sure he would find it funny, so days would go by in which he did no mischief, but only explored — still cautiously — the place in which he now lived. He also rested, in his usual erratic pattern, with infrequent but long periods of sleep. In Emily’s bedroom he had found the shelf on which four of the books from the MacDevon’s library now stood. (The other two, Daemonologie and the book about the clans, were in Jessup’s room.) She had put them in a place of honor, set apart from the other books, propped between two heavy brass vases which served as bookends.

  Inside one of these vases, on a bed of cotton balls stolen from the bathroom, the Boggart slept. Once in a while, roused by formless dreams in which he heard the waves lapping on Loch Linnhe, or the distant bark of a seal, he would reach a long arm out of the vase and touch, for comfort, the cover of the book of Scottish ballads from Castle Keep.

  The kitten Polydore discovered him in his brass vase not long after he chose it as his bed. She was a house cat now, not allowed outdoors for fear of traffic and the other perils of city streets, so she spent her time checking up on every smallest corner of the Volnik house. She toured every room, every day, leaping up on to bookshelves and chests and bureaus, stepping delicately around ornaments and photograph frames. And brass vases used as bookends.

  The day she found the Boggart, he was asleep. He woke to find Polly’s head filling the top of his vase, and he reached up crossly and gave her whiskers a violent tweak. Polly yowled, jumped backward, and fell off the bookcase. She gave the Boggart’s vase a wide berth after that, but the Boggart occasionally amused himself by drinking her milk from one side of her saucer while she lapped it from the other, or dropping spiky unexpected objects into her cat bed just as she prepared to lie down.

  Polly didn’t know what to make of him; her life had never contained an invisible nuisance before. Whenever she sensed that he was near her she would crouch warily in a corner, with her ears pricked. The family began to notice this after a while, and decided with regret that their cat, though lovable, must also be a little crazy.

  After the sheltered life he had led for so long in Castle Keep, the Boggart was at first baffled by the Volnik house. In Scotland he had never encountered anything electrical except the lights, telephone and radio in the Camerons’ shop, since the MacDevon had always flatly refused to have electricity in the castle. The first time the Boggart saw Maggie switching on the television set, to produce a bright flickering image of a small world inside a box, he was astounded. Clearly Maggie, like himself, could work magic.

  This was confirmed when he saw Maggie in the kitchen, with a magical whirring whisk that beat eggs all on its own at her command, and a magic kettle that boiled water without being set on the stove. Even when she cleaned her teeth in the bathroom, she had a toothbrush whose bristles magically buzzed up and down while her hand remained still. Maggie Volnik, the Boggart decided, must be a witch. It took him several days to realize that everyone else around him was capable of the same magic simply by pressing a switch that brought electric current out of a wire.

  After that, electricity became a challenge. The Boggart had to see whether this amazing strange power could be mastered by his own magic. Sure enough, it could. After a little practice, he could hover behind Maggie in the kitchen and make her electric beater stop and go backward, producing some gratifying splashing and shrieks. He could make the lights flicker as if a bulb were about to burn out, or make the telephone ring even though nobody was calling. Soon he found he could also change the channel on the screen of the television set. The day he first tried was a Saturday. Jessup was watching a hockey game, and Emily was sitting at the table drawing a map of Greece for her homework.

  Jessup howled suddenly. “Em! Put it back!”

  Emily looked up. “Put what back?”

  “The game! C’mon, it’s the third period!”

  “Are you crazy? I haven’t done a thing.”

  “Oh big joke, I know you’ve got the remote. Come on, I was watching the Maple Leafs and the Bruins and now I’ve got some old woman making a cake.”

  Jessup dived at the television set, without noticing the remote control lying peacefully at its side, and he clicked the knob — and found the cooking program facing him on every channel he turned to. He swung vengefully around and launched himself at Emily, who threw her book at him in self-defense.

  “I don’t have the remote control!” she yelled.

  The Boggart chuckled joyously, and small Polly the cat hissed at him from underneath an armchair. He took care not to repeat the same trick often. Instead he tried others, like turning the television set off — without touching the switch — at the climax of a thriller, or turning it on in the middle of the night. Robert called in a television repairman, who charged him fifty dollars and told him there was nothing wrong with the set.

  Robert was not seen often at home at the moment, since he was not only running his theater but directing its next production, Cymbeline. Maggie was coping with the arrival of her second shipment of furniture from Castle Keep, Emily was organizing a recycling drive at school, and Jessup was neglecting his computer and the Gang of Five for the sake of hockey practice. They all met at brisk intervals for breakfast and dinner.

  One breakfast time, Emily was filling lunch boxes. “Jess? You want peanut butter and jelly again?”

  “Of course!”

  “G
ross!” said Emily to herself in quiet revulsion, as she dug the knife deep into the peanut-butter jar. The Boggart sat on the table, watching hungrily. He had discovered that he loved peanut butter, but never found himself in control of all the makings for the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich that went, every day without fail, into Jessup’s lunch box. Watching Emily slather chunky peanut butter on one piece of bread, and glistening blackberry jelly on the other, he was filled with such greed that he decided he must, he absolutely must, get to this sandwich before Jessup did. So when Emily fitted the sandwich, inside its neat plastic bag, into the lunch box along with the thermos, the cookies and the apple, the Boggart slipped in with it.

  Emily closed the box, and Jessup seized it as he rushed past her with his sports bag. “Cat’s acting crazy again,” he said. “Thanks, Em. Bye.”

  Emily saw Polly the cat hunched in a corner of the room, taut and nervous — but as Jessup disappeared toward the front door, Polly instantly relaxed and strolled over toward the table, purring hopefully. Emily frowned. Was the cat afraid of Jessup? The cat adored Jessup. It didn’t make any sense — like a lot of things that had been happening in the Volnik house recently.

  THE BOGGART bounced up and down in the lunch box as Jessup ran to school. He clung to a hinge, fending off the apple with his feet, listening to the strange roaring sounds that were first the noise of traffic, and afterward the shouting of many ten-year-olds. Like all boggarts, he could alter his size and shape as he chose. But it was uncomfortable to stay at a forced size for more than an hour or two, and by the time Jessup opened his box at lunchtime the Boggart was decidedly stiff and cramped.

  But that hadn’t stopped him from eating Jessup’s sandwich. Once the lunch box had stopped its bouncing, after being safely stowed in Jessup’s locker, the Boggart had pulled open the plastic bag and settled himself down to chomp happily through the sticky meld of jelly, peanut butter and bread. Now he was full and sleepy, and the plastic bag held nothing but crumbs. Jessup stared at them in outrage at lunchtime when he opened the box.

  “Somebody stole my sandwich!”

  “Musta got a letdown,” said Chris placidly, opening his own. “You had peanut butter again, huh?”

  “It was locked up! Someone must know my locker combination!”

  “Let’s go get a taco. You got any money?”

  “Some,” said Jessup guardedly.

  “Come on then.” Chris jumped up. There was a little Tex-Mex café a block from the school which did a thriving business with sandwich-spurning fifth graders at lunchtimes.

  “But it’s allowance! I’m not spending my allowance on lunch!”

  Chris sat down again. He said reluctantly, “You better have half my sandwich, then.”

  “What is it?”

  “Bologna.”

  “Yuck,” said Jessup ungratefully.

  “Well, take your pick, man. Bologna or bucks.”

  Jessup had no trouble with the choice. His allowance was earmarked for computer discs. They sat morosely eating Chris’s sandwich, and Jessup gave Chris half his cookies, to make up. The Boggart hovered at their elbows, stealing any chocolate chips that fell out of the cookies. He found the school an alarming place — so many children, all at once! — and when lunch was over he draped himself over Jessup’s shoulder, for safety, with one leg tucked inside the collar of Jessup’s sweatshirt. This gave Jessup a slight itch, and he reached up half-consciously to scratch his neck from time to time. The Boggart would have liked to sleep, but he had to keep a wary eye open for the hand coming toward him, and dodge.

  He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which — having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles — he found inaccurate and boring. After that he clung desperately to the sweatshirt collar while Jessup raced through the school with Chris to get to hockey practice. In the locker-room the Boggart hovered nervously in the air as the team changed, ducking when they threw pads at each other, puzzling over the fact that boys so young should be putting on the kind of protective padding only worn, in his own experience, by medieval knights practicing for a joust.

  But once he was out on the hockey rink, sheltering breathless inside Jessup’s face mask as he whizzed over the ice, he realized that nothing had changed. This was a joust. It was just as passionate and just as dangerous, even though conducted by children. Admittedly they were whacking with their weapons not at each other, at least not often, but at the small rounded black object they seemed to call a puck. (Some old dark sorcery at work there, the Boggart thought suspiciously — why else call your victim by one of the names of the most ancient good spirit of all?) But they were certainly preparing for a major contest, all of them battling to be thought worthy of competing in the tournament.

  He was so deep in these reflections, sitting on Jessup’s shoulder while Jessup waited on the bench, that he was taken by surprise when a shout from the coach whirled the next forward line out onto the ice. Jessup dived into the game so fast that the Boggart had no time to shelter inside his face mask; he grabbed one of its bars from the outside and hung on, desperately dangling. Far down the ice a defense player hit the puck, and it rose up and flew toward Jessup. Caught off balance, Jessup could only dodge sideways, so that the puck narrowly missed his helmet. It hit the Boggart instead.

  Nobody was ever able to report precisely what happened: the details were too fast for a human eye to see. The puck disappeared, vaporized by contact with the power of the Old Magic; but the Boggart, jolted by the impact even though boggarts cannot be hurt or feel pain, became suddenly visible. Curled up into a small, dense shape, he shot across the ice — looking just like a hockey puck. And the same defense player, an aggressive dark-haired boy called Pete Defarge, swung back his stick joyously and hit him high into the air.

  The Boggart-puck hurtled over the heads of the teams — but instead of falling down again, it flew on. Making a strange whistling sound, it wheeled high into the stadium, flying in circles, faster and faster, around and around. The players stood frozen on the ice, looking up; the coach and umpires and substitutes gaped from the sidelines. Furious, manic, the Boggart wheeled once more — and disappeared. The stadium was silent, as everyone waited for the sound of the puck falling, and heard nothing.

  Coach Bonhomme, who had felt a strange cold terror while he watched, suddenly found his voice. “Okay, okay, what are you waiting for?” He threw another puck onto the ice. “Let’s go, boys — Volnik, Passant, play ball!”

  As if wakened from a dream, the players began moving again, first slowly, then faster, as the game took on its own new momentum. Every boy on the ice was trying to forget, to pretend that he had not seen what he had seen — how could a hockey puck fly in circles, whistling? So they played even more furiously than before, as if they were opposing not their own classmates but some hated rival team. Chris leaped about in his goal behind his pads; Jessup and the other forwards flickered like lightning over the rink, and the defense players crashed about, skidding. It was fast efficient hockey until the moment when Jessup whirled down the ice with the puck, with Pete Defarge dashing at him for a tackle — and suddenly with all the speed and power of the Wild Magic the Boggart was back, diving vengefully between the two, tipping Defarge sideways so ferociously that he seemed to turn a cartwheel. His stick snapped in two, his arms and legs whirled; he hurtled on his back across the ice and his helmeted head crashed against the wall.

  Pete Defarge lay still. And in the instant before rushing to pick him up, everyone glanced reproachfully at Jessup, who seemed to have tripped him deliberately with a vicious foul play.

  “BUT I DIDN’T!” Jessup said indistinctly, through his mouth guard.

  “He’s not hurt,” Coach Bonhomme said. “Fortunately.”

  “Coach, I didn’t trip him! I was just coming up the ice, I didn’t have time!”

  Coach Bonhomme sighed. He was a burly man with a flattened nose, an ex-professi
onal who had seen every dirty trick that can be played on a hockey rink, and had indeed played most of them. He said, “I saw you, Volnik. Seein’s believin’.”

  Jessup pulled off his helmet and spat out the mouth guard. “You saw the puck go up in the air and fly around the rink three times too — did you believe that?”

  Coach Bonhomme shrugged. “Seein’s believin’,” he said again. “Sure I did. Didn’t you?”

  SEVEN

  JESSUP SPENT ALL his next hockey game on the bench, as a punishment for illegally tripping Pete Defarge. He was cross. Nobody, not even his friends, really seemed to believe that he hadn’t done it. They believed he hadn’t intended to, but like Coach Bonhomme, they couldn’t get past the evidence of their own eyes. Or in his parents’ case, the evidence of so many other eyes. “Never mind,” they said forgivingly, infuriatingly, to Jessup. “You didn’t mean to hurt him. It was an accident.”

  The only person who was sympathetic, to his surprise, was Emily.

  “Grown-ups can be so dumb,” she said. “If you know you didn’t do it, then of course you didn’t.”

  “But who did?”

  “Maybe Pete tripped.”

  “No way. One minute he was coming toward me, and the next he was flying in the other direction. I mean flying.”

  “Weird,” Emily said, shaking her head. “Like the TV, and the lights flickering, and stuff. I was telling Nat about that today. She said maybe it was sunspots.” Nat was Natalie, her closest friend at school, who was a serious astronomer and on fine winter nights spent hours of after-school time looking through her telescope.

  “Emily! Jessup!” It was Maggie calling them to supper. They ran, and the Boggart breathed an impatient sigh of relief. He had been waiting for them to get out of Jessup’s room so that he could leave a surprise present there.

  Since the hockey game, the Boggart had been feeling guilty. It was an emotion he had never felt before, and he found it very uncomfortable. But he knew he had given Jessup a bad time, in ways he hadn’t intended. Robbing his lunch box was one thing — getting him labeled as a cheat and a liar was far more serious. What’s more, he, the Boggart, had broken his own rules: He had attacked Pete Defarge on the ice not for fun but for furious revenge. The laws of the Wild Magic allowed this as a defense against evil and murder, but not against an accidental whack from a hockey puck.